When did you last have an opportunity to share your faith?
Probably for most of us our best opportunities to engage in witness come when we can tell a friend about how we came to faith. These individual conversations are the stuff on which the church is built.
Personal opportunities are a crucial part of apologetics. The ‘defence of the faith’ is not the preserve of the lecture hall or debating chamber. The key verse used in explaining apologetics is 1 Peter 3.15: ‘Be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.’ Notice how personal these words are. It is the hope that you have. It is an answer to those who ask you.
Beyond the subjective
The danger of relying on a testimony is that it sounds subjective. It is commonplace to criticise the classic hymn on the resurrection, ‘I serve a risen Saviour’. The chorus line sounds dangerously subjective: ‘You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.’ The writer’s sentiment is not bad – we should be able to bear witness to the resurrection in our hearts. But a testimony should not remain subjective. It is an opportunity to talk about objective truth. ‘You ask me how I know he lives? There is factually verifiable evidence accessible to ordinary historical methods’ does not make a great chorus.
Truth matters more than feelings
G. K. Chesterton observed in Orthodoxy: ‘A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed.’ His point is even more apparent a century later. Our culture values and trusts personal experience above objective facts. In some circles, my feelings about my gender, disabilities or ethnicity are given more weight than a medical report. In contrast, the biblical worldview reminds us to be suspicious of our feelings and dogmatic about the truth. The best testimonies are less about us and more about Christ.
This is one reason why a simple testimony can be such an effective apologetic. Life stories that are very dramatic (drug gangs, kidnappings and celebrities) certainly capture people’s attention. But they can eclipse the gospel itself. The focus becomes the witness herself, not what she is a witness of.
A child’s judgment
We should not belittle the testimony of an adult Christian who was brought up in a Christian home. As a matter of fact, that kind of story is profound in a rebellious culture that emphasises mistrust of authority and a cult of the new. Who better to judge the authenticity of Christians than their own children? And if those children follow their parent’s faith then it is hard to imagine a more valuable endorsement.
Sharing our own stories of how we have come to faith and how we continue in our faith can sow seeds among the most hostile or apathetic of hearers. I love the story that Francis Collins tells of his own conversion. As former head of the Human Genome Project, Collins has been a leading scientist in his field. When he had been a medical student, and an atheist, Collins regularly spent time with sick and dying patients: ‘I witnessed numerous cases of individuals whose faith provided them with a strong reassurance of ultimate peace, be it in this world or the next’ (The Language of God, p.19).
Life and death
This testimony of suffering believers challenged him. ‘My most awkward moment came when an older woman, suffering daily from severe untreatable angina, asked me what I believed. It was a fair question; we had discussed many other important issues of life and death, and she had shared her own strong Christian beliefs with me. I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words “I’m not really sure.’’ ’ (p.20). The lady may not have been able to settle a debate over evolution or given a logically rigorous account of why God permits suffering, but she could share her own faith and pose a question to Collins. And this set him on a journey. ‘I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking’, he writes.
Who knows how powerful your own testimony might be? Sharing the reason for the faith that you have, in your own way, builds the case for Christ that can demolish strongholds of even the most hostile atheist.
